About me | Research | Teaching | Publications | Talks | Patents | Services | Students I am an Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Texas School of Information. I teach courses such as Applied Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Deep Learning, and Introduction to Human-Centered Data Science. Before serving as a faculty, I was a research scientist at Apple inc., Seattle and IBM India Research Lab working on language understanding and generation components of Siri and IBM Watson. I have obtained Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. My primary area of interest is Machine Learning for Natural Langauge Processing and I am quite passionate about problems related to language generation, language models, and multimodal and cognition-inspired NLP. In my last role at Apple, I was responsible for developing multimodal and multilingual on-device models for understanding users' intent when they interact with Siri in a privacy-preserving manner. The work touches upon concepts such as multimodal language models, modality fusion, model distillation, and compression. Over the years, I have been quite fascinated by generative modeling for conversational AI and have spent a considerable amount of time working on problems related to Natural Language Generation (NLG), dealing with data-to-text and text-to-text generation paradigms. In data-to-text, my research aims at generating natural language descriptions from structured data such as knowledge graphs, tables, etc. In text-to-text, my focus has been on problems such as text simplification, text style transfer and controllable paraphrasing.

• INF 385T : Special Topics in Information Science - Deep Learning and Multimodal Systems (Fall 2023)
• INF 385T : Special Topics in Information Science - Natural Language Processing and Applications (Fall 2023)
• I320D - Topics in Human-Centered Data Science Applied Machine Learning with Python (Spring 2023)
• I 310D - Introduction to Human-Centered Data Science (Spring 2023, Fall 2023)

• [B1] Abhijit Mishra and Pushpak Bhattacharyya, “Cognitively Inspired Natural Language Processing", Springer, Singapore. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1516-9 . URL: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-13-1516-9#about
• [C25] Abhijit Mishra, Mingda Li, Soham Deo. 2023. SentinelLMs: Encrypted Input Adaptation and Fine-tuning of Language Models for Private and Secure Inference. Accepted and to appear In proceedings of the 38th Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024). Vancouver, Canada, February 20-27, 2024.
• [C24] Kishan Maharaj, Ashita Saxena, Raja Kumar, Abhijit Mishra, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya Eyes Show the Way: Harnessing Gaze Features for Hallucination Detection . Findings of Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023). Singapore, Dec 6-10, 2023.
• [C23] Jiwen Zhang, Abhijit Mishra, Siddharth Patwardhan and Sachin Agarwal. 2022. Can Open Domain Question Answering Systems Answer Visual Knowledge Questions?.arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.04306
• [C22] Abhijit Mishra, Faisal M. Chowdhury, Sagar Manohar, Dan Gutfreund, and Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2020. Template Controllable keywords-to-text Generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.03722
• [C21] Sandeep Mathias, Rudra Murthy, Diptesh Kanojia, Abhijit Mishra, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2020. Happy Are Those Who Grade without Seeing: A Multi-Task Learning Approach to Grade Essays Using Gaze Behaviour. In proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNLP 2020), worldwide.
• [C20] Sandeep Mathias, Diptesh Kanojia, Abhijit Mishra and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2020. A Survey on Using Gaze Behaviour for Natural Language Processing. In proceedings of the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 17th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-PRICAI 2020), Yokohama, Japan.
• [C19] Abhijit Mishra, Tarun Tater, Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2019. A Modular Architecture for Unsupervised Sarcasm Generation. In proceedings of the Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2019), Hong Kong, China, 3rd Nov - 7th Nov, 2019
• [C18] Anirban Laha, Parag Jain, Abhijit Mishra, Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2019. Scalable Micro planned Generation of Discourse from Structured Data. Computational Linguistics, MIT Press
• [C17] Sai Surya, Abhijit Mishra, Anirban Laha, Parag Jain, Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2019. Unsupervised Neural Text Simplification. In proceedings of the 57th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019), Florence, Italy, 28th July-2nd Aug, 2019.
• [C16] Parag Jain, Abhijit Mishra, Amar P. Azad, Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2019. Unsupervised Controllable Text Formalization. In proceedings of the 33rd Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019), Hawaii, USA, 27th Jan - 1st Feb, 2019
• [C15] Sandeep Mathias, Diptesh Kanojia, Kevin Patel, Samarth Agrawal, Abhijit Mishra and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2018. Eyes are the Windows to the Soul: Predicting the Rating of Text Quality Using Gaze Behaviour. In proceedings of the 56th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018), Melbourne, Australia, 15-20 July, 2018.
• [C14] Vitobha Munigala, Abhijit Mishra, Srikanth Govindaraj Tamilselvam, Shreya Khare, Riddhiman Dasgupta and Anush Sankaran. 2018. PersuaAIDE ! An Adaptive Persuasive Text Generation System for Fashion Domain. In proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW 2018), Lyon, France, 23th April - 27th April,2018
• [C13] Abhijit Mishra, Srikanth Tamilselvam, Riddhiman Dasgupta, Seema Nagar and Kuntal Dey. 2018. Cognition-Cognizant Sentiment Analysis with Multitask Subjectivity Summarization based on Annotators' Gaze Behavior. In proceedings of the 32nd Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2018), New Orleans, USA, 2nd February - 7th February, 2018
• [C12] Srikanth Tamilselvam, Seema Nagar, Abhijit Mishra and Kuntal Dey. 2017. Graph Based Sentiment Aggregation using ConceptNet Ontology. In proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2017), Taipei, Taiwan, 27 November-1st December, 2017
• [C11]b> Shweta Garg, Sudhanshu S Singh, Abhijit Mishra and Kuntal Dey. 2017. CVBed: Structuring CVs using Word Embeddings. In proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2017), Taipei, Taiwan, 27 November-1st December, 2017
• [C10] Joe Cheri Ross, Abhijit Mishra, Kaustuv Kanti Ganguli and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2017. Identifying Raga Similarity Through Embeddings Learned from Compositions' Notation. In proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2017), Suzhou, China, 23-28 October, 2017
• [C9] Abhijit Mishra, Kuntal Dey and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2017. Learning Cognitive Features from Gaze Data for Sentiment and Sarcasm Classiffication using Convolutional Neural Network. In proceedings of the 55th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2017), Vancouver, Canada, 30 July-4 August, 2017
• [C8] Abhijit Mishra, Diptesh Kanojia, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey, Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2017. Scanpath Complexity: Modeling Reading Effort using Gaze Information. In proceedings of the 31st Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2017), San Francisco, USA, 4-9 February, 2017
• [C7] Abhijit Mishra, Diptesh Kanojia, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2016. Harnessing Cognitive Features for Sarcasm Detection. In proceedings of the 54th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2016), Berlin, Germany, 7-12 August, 2016
• [C6] Abhijit Mishra, Diptesh Kanojia, Kuntal Dey, Seema Nagar and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2016. Leveraging Cognitive Features for Sentiment Analysis. In proceedings of the SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2016), Berlin, Germany, August 11-12, 2016
• [C5] Abhijit Mishra, Diptesh Kanojia and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2016. Predicting Readers' Sarcasm Understandability by Modelling Gaze Behaviour. In proceedings of the 30th Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2016), Phoenix, USA, Feb 12-17, 2016
• [C4] Aditya Joshi, Abhijit Mishra, Balamurali AR, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Mark J Carman. 2015. A Computational Approach for Automatic Prediction of Drunk-texting. In proceedings of the 53rd Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2015), Beijing, China, July 2015 (short-paper)
• [C3] Aditya Joshi, Abhijit Mishra, Nivvedan Senthamilselvan and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2014. Measuring Sentiment Annotation Complexity of Text. In proceedings of the 52nd Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2014), Baltimore, USA, 23-25 June, 2014 (short-paper)
• [C2] Anoop Kunchukuttan, Abhijit Mishra, Rajen Chatterjee, Ritesh Shah and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2014. Shata-Anuvadak: Tackling Multiway Translation of Indian Languages. In proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2014), Rekjyavik, Iceland, 26-31 May, 2014
• [C1] Abhijit Mishra and Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Michael Carl. 2013. Automatically Predicting Sentence Translation Difficulty. In proceedings of the 51st Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013), Soffia, Bulgaria, 4-9 August, 2013 (short-paper)
• [W8] Parag Jain, Priyanka Agrawal, Abhijit Mishra, Mohak Sukhwani and Anirban Laha. 2017. Story Generation from Sequence of Independent Short Descriptions. ML4Creativity, SIGKDD Workshop, Halifax, Nova Scotia - Canada, 2017
• [W7] Joe Cheri, Abhijit Mishra and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2016. Leveraging Annotators' Gaze Behaviour for Coreference Resolution. ACL 2016 Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning (CogACLL 2016) at ACL 2016, Berlin, Germany, August 11, 2016
• [W6] Diptesh Kanojia, Shehzaad Dhuliawala, Abhijit Mishra, Naman Gupta and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2015. TransChat: Cross-Lingual Instant Messaging for Indian Languages. ICON 2015, December 2015
• [W5] Abhijit Mishra, Aditya Joshi and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2014. A cognitive study of subjectivity extraction in sentiment annotation. 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2014), Baltimore, USA, 27 June, 2014
• [W4] Anoop Kunchukuttan, Ratish Pudupully, Rajen Chatterjee, Abhijit Mishra, Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2014. The IIT Bombay SMT System for ICON 2014 Tools Contest. NLP Tools Contest at ICON 2014 (ICON 2014), Goa, India, Dec 2014
• [W3] Piyush Dungarwal, Rajen Chatterjee, Abhijit Mishra, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Ritesh Shah and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2014. The IIT Bombay Hindi-English Translation System at WMT 2014. 9th Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT14), Baltimore, USA, 26-27 June, 2014
• [W2] Anoop Kunchukuttan, Rajen Chatterjee, Shourya Roy, Abhijit Mishra and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2013. TransDoop: A Map-Reduce based Crowdsourced Translation for Complex Domain. ACL 2013, Soffia, Bulgaria, 4-9 August, 2013
• [W1] Abhijit Mishra, Michael Carl and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2012. A Heuristic Based Approach for Systematic Error Correction of Gaze Data for Reading. First Workshop on Eye Tracking and NLP, part of COLING 2012. Mumbai, India, 15 Dec, 2012

• (Accepted) Nihar Sahoo, Ashita Saxena, Kishan Maharaj, Arif Ahmad, Abhijit Mishra and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. Tutorial on Addressing Bias and Hallucination in Large Language Models LREC-COLING 2024. Torino, Italy. May 20-25, 2024.
• 4th January, 2021: Industry Keynote Frontiers in Natural Language Understanding for Conversational Platforms, CODS-COMAD, 2021, Worldwide
• 28 July, 2019: Storytelling from Structured Data and Knowledge Graphs: An NLG Perspective. Tutorial at the 57th Annual Conference of ACL 2019, Florence, Italy.
• 18 June, 2019: Controllable Text Style Transfer”, AI Horizon Network Seminar Series, IBM (worldwide)
• 18 Jan, 2019: Tutorial on “Natural Language Generation and its Applications”, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
• 28 July, 2018: Invited talk at The FAER Faculty Development Workshop on AI\&ML, M.S. Ramaiah University titled “Understanding how machines understand us: A perspective on Natural Language Processing”, M.S. Ramaiah University, Bangalore, India
• 26 Apr, 2018: Tutorial on “Cognitively Inspired Natural Language Understanding and Generation”, Dharmsinh Desai University, Gujarat, India
• 20 Jan, 2018: Tutorial on “Natural Language Generation”, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
• 20 June 2016: Tutorial on “Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning”, VIVA Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India

1. Vinayak Sastri, Joydeep Mondal, Abhijit Mishra, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey. 2019. Dynamic Content Rating Assistant. 20210065043. US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO)
2. Abhijit Mishra, Enara C Vijil, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey. 2018. Question Answering System influenced by User Behavior and Text Metadata Generation. 20200302316. US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO)
3. Abhijit Mishra, Parag Jain, Anirban Laha, Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2018. Generation of Variable Natural Language Descriptions From Structured Data. 20200073944. US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO)
4. Parag Jain, Amar Azad, Abhit Mishra, Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2018. Unsupervised Tunable Stylized Text Transformations. 20200034432. US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO)
5. Abhijit Mishra, Anirban Laha, Parag Jain, Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2018. Real time assessment of Text Consistency. 20200302011. US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO)
6. Abhijit Mishra, Parag Jain, Amar Azad, Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2018. Controllable Style-Based Text Transformation20200311195, US Patents and Trademarks Office (USPTO)

Senior Program Committee Member

• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024, AAAI 2022, AAAI 2021)

Program Committee Member / Reviewer

• Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023, ACL 2022, ACL 2021, ACL 2020, ACL 2019, ACL 2018 [adjudged as outstanding reviewer], ACL 2017)
• Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL 2023, TACL 2022, TACL 2020)
• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023, AAAI 2022, AAAI 2020)
• International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2022, IJCAI 2020)
• Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023, EMNLP 2022, EMNLP 2021, EMNLP 2020 [Adjudged as outstanding reviewer], EMNLP 2019, EMNLP 2018)
• Computational Linguistics Conference (COLING 2022, COLING 2020, COLING 2018)
• North American chapter of Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2022, NAACL 2016)
• European Chapter of Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2023, EACL 2021)
• The Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL-IJCNLP 2023, AACL-IJCNLP 2023, AACL-IJCNLP 2022, AACL 2020,
• ACM Computing Surveys (ACM-CSur, 2020)
• ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP 2018)
• Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018)
• IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2018)
• Conference on Machine Translation (WMT 2017)

Organizing Committee member

• Computational Linguistic Conference (COLING 2012), Mumbai, India

UT School of Information Students

1. Mingda Li (Informatics Capstone, 2023): Zero Short Visual Knowledge Question Answering with LLMs
2. Carla Gonzalez (Informatics Capstone, 2023): Concept Guided LLMs for Zero Short Visual Knowledge Question Answering (2023 Informatics Capstone)
3. Sonali Hornick Li (Informatics Capstone, 2023): An Empirical Evaluation of LLMs for Zero-shot Visual Knowledge Question Answering

Co-supervising Outside of UT

1. Kishan Maharaj (MS Research, IIT Bombay): Cognitively Inspired NLP for Hallucination Detection in Generative NLP Models
2. Ashita Saxena (MS Research, IIT Bombay): Hallucination Detection and Mitigation in Generative NLP Models

Internships Mentored

1. Neha Hulkund (BS, MIT, 2021): Leveraging Scene Descriptions for Open Domain Visual Question Answering, at Apple inc., Summer 2021
2. Ivy Zhang (Rotation Engineer, Apple inc., 2021): Adapting T5 Closed Book QA for Knowledge Oriented Visual Queries at Apple inc., Summer 2021
3. Kevin Patel (Ph.D., IIT Bombay, 2019): Explaining Black-box NLP Models through Eye-tracking at IBM Research, Summer 2019
4. •Sai Surya (B.Tech, IIT Kharagpur, 2018): Unsupervised Neural Text Simplification at IBM Research, Summer 2018
5. Krishna Guddipati (B.Tech, IIT Bombay, 2017): Scoring Grammaticality of NLG output at IBM Research, Summer 2017

Last updated on 19/07/2023 at 5:00 p.m. CST